Other novels by Roger McDonald




THE SLAP (1996)


The slap in the title of Roger McDonald's fifth novel is a life-giving blow delivered to a baby boy at the font of an Australian country church, over fifty years ago.
Tanner Hatton Finch is granted life that day. But there seems perilously little promise in it. He grows up wild in isolated, windswept countryside, the child of misplaced artistic parents. Obsessed with fire and explosives, he lies, cheats, and steals his way through a childhood set on a course of opposition and destruction.
Only one person, Ruby, doesn't turn away from him. The story of their friendship - unlovable withered frog, it was only ever Ruby who could reach him with her great little heart - forms the centrepiece of the novel until the dramatic appearance of Kel, a boy with a talent for loyalty and a love of knives, and Tanner's life changes absolutely.
Told over the span of a lifetime, The Slap reveals the redemptive power of friendship and love in a story that delivers its surprises to the very end.



WATER MAN (1993)





Gunner Fitch, a near-legendary water diviner, has been dead for over fifty years., but people in the town of Logan's Reef are still trying to escape his strange legacy.
His son Mal, a famous Sydney theatre director, returns every year to the drought-stricken town for reasons he is only beginning to understand. An old story of rivalry and passion rules his blood, involving an unkept promise and "a chain of hurt reaching down from a cruel, courageous action taken by a barely remembered woman in the name of love".
When Ida, Mal's actress lover, writes a play based on the life there, matters left unfinished in one generation begin to clamour for attention in the next.
It takes three men in Gunner's old truck, one of them an uncanny fit-throwing outcast with a nose for hidden water, to finish what Gunner had set in motion all those years before. To allow the past to break through and the circle to close. And, in so doing, to reveal to those lost in their lives a simple truth: "The thing about change is it shows you who you were all along. It brings you to yourself."




ROUGH WALLABY (1989)





Look at the Ringer, all his grace with animals reduced to a single challenge, 'them or me' in the rodeo arena...When the horse was done it was taken out the back and shot. 'Rough wallaby', the Ringer called it: what everyone got at the end, when they were forced down to living out their dreams.

Chink Lloyd, animal-trainer, dreams of the Ringer, the rodeo legend, and going on the road again. Terry Punch, city talk-back radio star, dreams of spending time in the country with his best mate, Chink.
Rough Wallaby is an exhilarating ride through the world of battling stud farmers and horse racers, high and low life, country and city, where losers go for broke and dreams are for living.




SLIPSTREAM (1982)






I bored a hole in the air for the first time. I did something first. They hate that here.
Roy Hilman was a famous aviator and Australian hero. A pilot in the Great War, a stunt flier in early Hollywood, a trans-pacific pioneer and a national celebrity, Hilman was a man drawn upwards by dogged, dazzling ambition. Seemingly unbreakable, idolised by a nation, he was also menaced by shadows.
In the foreground of the novel are the people closest to Hilman: his wife Olga, seduced by the velocity of flight and the man who controlled it; Charles Coulter, Hilman's sponsor, abandoned by Olga for the man he backed financially; Claude McKechnie, Hilman's official biographer, a young man in search of an idol; Leonard Baxter, who braves public outrage and sacrifices his career for the love of another man's wife. All are bound together by intrigue and colliding emotions, their complex responses to Hilman coloured by their own dreams and desires.

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